Shenzen offers pen-input touchscreen netbook

First netbook with digitizer pen input

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16 October 2009 11:29 GMT / By Lars-Göran Nilsson

It's not easy for netbook manufacturers to stand out from the crowd, especially when you consider how small the actual differences in terms of hardware from one model to another is.

Tablet PC models have turned up more recently, although until now they've all used a standard finger touch display which just requires your finger to work.

However, we ran into a Chinese company called Shenzen Gold-East Electronics Co Ltd - oddly enough, based in Shenzhen - that figured it was a good idea to fit a digitizer pen input display instead of a touch display.

So what? You might say, well, the advantage is that you get much more precise touch input and we have a feeling that this might become popular with various organisations that are looking for a cheap pen-input type touchscreen device.

Considering that the economy has yet to kick off again and with all the spending cuts, we might soon enough see couriers running around with these asking for your signature instead of those fancy expensive tablets that they have these days.

On a more serious note, we can also see these being useful for people that like to jot down notes on it, especially as it can be used in tablet mode, although you have to manually switch the screen rotation by pressing one of the two buttons next to the screen.

A version of Windows XP for Tablet PC should work just fine on it, although it's unlikely that we'll see Microsoft give that union its blessing. We're not sure it'll be a big seller, but it's at least somewhat innovative in what is a fairly stagnant market.